


Infernal Machine

by bomberqueen17



Series: Two-Body Problem [13]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Ancient Devices, Epilepsy, Friendship, John Sheppard Whump, M/M, Rodney POV, Sleep Sex, porn and plot, relationship drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-19
Updated: 2014-05-02
Packaged: 2018-01-19 22:58:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1487254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Back on Atlantis, Rodney and John get used to different quarters and a slightly different dynamic. Then the science teams discover a machine that has a really pronounced effect on all the native ATA carriers.</p>
<p>It starts off with some nearly-gratuitous porn, though, just because I needed some of that in my life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

The memory of peeling Sheppard out of those jeans and finding out he had no underwear underneath them sustained Rodney pretty well through the first week back on Atlantis. Things were hectic, everything was scrambled, but at least during the time the Ancients, and then afterward the Replicators, had been in control of Atlantis, they’d done a shitload of repairs. Rodney stayed awake for about three days in a caffeinated haze of bliss, punctuated occasionally by food and daydreams of that denim-clad ass, going through all the new things it was possible to learn about the city now, until at some point Sheppard came and got him and put him to bed. 

When he woke up, he was in a room with all his stuff in boxes, his blankets on the bed, his prescription mattress on the bed even, but it wasn’t a room he recognized. He dragged himself out of bed and into the shower and from there to the mess hall, which— wasn’t the mess hall anymore— there was a sign, they’d relocated it. The Ancients had restored their original kitchens and now there was a much nicer, fully-furnished mess hall one level down, with awesome views out onto the water, beautifully decorated. 

Rodney absent-mindedly tried to pull his phone out to text Sheppard, and it was only when he couldn’t find it that he remembered phones weren’t a thing, here. He’d gotten really used to texting really fast on Earth, worryingly fast. He hit his radio instead, and summoned Sheppard. Sheppard answered with laconic amusement, but after a few minutes, strolled in. In uniform, unfortunately, no jeans in sight. 

“Did you move me into new quarters?” Rodney asked. 

“Wasn’t me,” Sheppard said. He dropped into a chair, long fingers wrapped around a coffee mug of distinctly non-Earth design. It was different this time; the Ancients, then the Replicators, had been annihilated, not evacuated. All their stuff was still here. Daniel Jackson was probably in agonies of jealousy. 

Rodney frowned, noticing something about the design on the cup. “Are you fucking kidding me,” he said. 

Sheppard raised an eyebrow. “About what?”

Rodney snatched the cup right out of his hand. “Are— oh my God,” he said. “This is an ATA-activated fucking coffee mug.”

Sheppard waggled his eyebrows. “Pretty neat, huh? A bunch of them do that. You can get them to keep your drink hot or cold depending what you think at it.”

Rodney inspected his own mug fiercely. “A bunch of them,” he said. 

Sheppard reached over and poked it. “Yup,” he said, and Rodney’s mug lit up. 

“Are you— agh,” Rodney blustered. God damn it, his gene should be enough for this. 

“Gotta have the real gene, I guess,” Sheppard said, far too smug.

“Oh,” Rodney said, as he touched it, “wait, no, I can use it now.” He gave Sheppard a look. “Guess I’ll have to have you initialize my mug every day.” He mentally adjusted the temperature up a degree, knowing he liked his coffee hotter than Sheppard did.

“That sounds dirty,” Sheppard commented. 

“So new quarters,” Rodney said. “They’re bigger, I like that, but what happened to the old ones?”

“Elizabeth redid the map,” Sheppard said, shrugging. “She wanted to rethink the distribution? I dunno.”

Rodney frowned. “Where are yours, then? Nobody shares my balcony anymore.”

Sheppard half-smiled. “I think I’m just down the hall and around the corner,” he said. “Teyla’s just down from me, and then Ronon’s along a little ways.” 

“Hm,” Rodney said. It meant no more shared balcony, and meant no more totally unobtrusive middle-of-the-night visits, and meant he couldn’t hear Sheppard through the wall if he woke up screaming. But that wasn’t the kind of thing one discussed in the mess hall. 

Sheppard shrugged. “Wasn’t really my choice,” he said quietly. “There were some meetings. You didn’t come.”

“I was busy,” Rodney pointed out. 

“At least the city isn’t sinkin’,” Sheppard mused. 

“Yes but there’s so—“ Rodney paused, regarded Sheppard with narrowed eyes. “You’re mocking me.”

Sheppard looked innocent. “Maybe,” he said. 

Rodney considered taking offense but just then the memory of those jeans replayed in his head again, and he swallowed hard. “Hey, um,” he said. “If you’re not busy I could use a hand unpacking.”

That got him some eyebrow quirking. “You think I’m not busy?” Sheppard asked. 

Rodney cleared his throat self-consciously. “I mean,” he said, “if you had a bit to take a break.” He looked as innocent as he could muster. “Some of those boxes are kind of heavy.”

“You need me to move heavy stuff,” Sheppard said flatly, but Rodney could read him sometimes, and right now he was amused and maybe flirting a little. 

“Y’know,” Rodney said, waving a hand. “If you get a minute. And I mean, that’s the kind of thing you’d wear jeans for.” He cleared his throat. “Y’know. What with all the heavy lifting, and the bending.”

Sheppard widened his eyes a little and smiled. “Why Doctor McKay,” he said, sucking on his teeth, “I do believe I catch your drift.”

“I’m very subtle,” Rodney agreed. 

“You sure are,” Sheppard said. He glanced at his watch. “I got a couple hours after shift change, barring catastrophe.”

 

Rodney’s door swished open to reveal Sheppard leaning in the doorway, jeans low on his skinny hips and flannel shirt untucked, holding a six-pack of cans by the plastic connector. Rodney, turning in his desk chair, just stared at him, mouth open. He shoved off the doorframe with one shoulder and ambled in. 

“Makes me wish I had a toolbelt,” Sheppard said, amused. He set the beer down on top of the nearest pile of boxes and hooked his thumbs in his belt loops. “Excuse me, ma’am, I’m here to see about the plumbin’?”

Rodney laughed as Sheppard came up to where he was sitting, pushing right into his personal space, shoving the wheeled chair back a little with his knees. The way the jeans hugged his long thighs was sort of overloading Rodney’s brain. “I refuse to be ma’am in this porno,” Rodney said. 

Sheppard tilted his head, looking down at him from very close range. “Y’know,” he said, biting his lip thoughtfully, “I’ve never actually watched a gay porno, so I don’t know what kinda titles the hunky plumber uses on the horny housewife if it’s another dude. Mister?” 

“You’ve never watched gay porn,” Rodney said blankly, staring up at him. The jeans had a button fly, their respective heights meaning it was right at Rodney’s chest level. He put his hands on Sheppard’s thighs. 

“No,” Sheppard said. “Never have. I assume the basic plots are about the same though.”

It was too much for Rodney to resist, and he moved his hands up to Sheppard’s waistband, pushing the shirt up a little. The jeans rode low enough that he could make out the crest of the hipbone, the divot underneath, leading to that groove that disappeared down under the waistband. He moved forward and bit Sheppard just there, scraping his teeth along the ridge of bone. 

Sheppard made a little noise. “You really didn’t even want me to move any boxes,” he said, hands going around the back of Rodney’s neck, sliding into his hair. 

“I can move my own boxes,” Rodney said. “I just wanted to peel you out of these.” He bit a little harder, and Sheppard twitched, but didn’t resist. “I’ve been thinking about you in these all week,” he admitted, and moved his mouth to bite at the fabric. He was smart enough to know he couldn’t unbutton jeans with his teeth, though, so he used his fingers to pop open the first button. 

“Haven’t you been busy?” Sheppard asked. 

“I’m a good multi-tasker,” Rodney said, and popped the second button open. Nope, definitely no underwear. Also, Sheppard had showered within the last hour, from the clean smell of his skin. Third button, and Sheppard was palpably turned-on now from the way these were starting to fit him. Fourth, fifth, and Rodney nuzzled at the exposed skin, crinkle of hair, Sheppard was most of the way hard and Rodney popped open one more button to free his cock and swallow it down. 

Sheppard made one of his hot little repressed groan noises and tightened his fingers in Rodney’s hair. “Aw,” he said, “Rodney, you— wow.”

Rodney moaned in pleasure and set to work sucking Sheppard’s dick, revelling in the hot slide of it against his tongue, grabbing Sheppard by the belt loops to hold him in place. “Oh,” Sheppard said, “yeah—“ and his voice had that low kind of raspy quality it only got during sex, “you know, all the way here, in that puddlejumper, I could see how uncomfortable you were sitting down because of how hard I’d just fucked you, and it was so goddamn distracting, Rodney.”

“Mm,” Rodney said, turned on almost past bearing, his own pants way too tight now. “Mm!”

“Not that I wasn’t a mite uncomfortable myself,” Sheppard went on. “You gave it to me pretty good too.”

Oh yeah, in the shower, and Rodney whimpered a little, remembering the slick, tight heat of being inside Sheppard’s body,the way John’s fingers had splayed out against the tile as he held himself up, the hoarse, desperate cries Sheppard had let himself make, the way John’s cock had jumped and pulsed in his hand in time with the slick spasms that had squeezed tight around Rodney’s cock. That had been an incredible fuck. 

Rodney moaned, and went to work on Sheppard’s cock with real purpose. Sheppard made a tight little noise and shuddered in his grip. “Fuck,” he hissed, “Rodney, fuck—“

Rodney pulled off after an increasingly-intense moment and looked up at him, hand moving purposefully. “Sheppard,” he said breathlessly, “can I—“

“Yes,” Sheppard said, with a shudder, and Rodney had him flat on his back on the bed in no time, yanking his untied boots off his sockless feet, peeling his jeans down his slim thighs, shoving his shirt up over his taut belly, and diving down to shoulder a knee and lick behind his balls. “Aah, Jesus,” he panted. 

Rodney had long since discovered all the ways he could use his tongue like this to make Sheppard totally nonverbal, desperately trembling and open and needy and unable to keep from making at least quiet sounds. He’d gotten him to really let go back on Earth. There had definitely been a different quality to the sex they’d had there— Sheppard’s willingness to mark him, for one; the last hickey was still faintly visible down by Rodney’s collarbone, fading by the day. Rodney wondered if he could get him to make more. 

“Rodney,” Sheppard said, almost a sob, as Rodney eventually pushed a finger in where his tongue had been; Sheppard’s cock was leaking, hips hitching. 

“I wanna fuck you,” Rodney said. “I want— God— I want to be inside you.”

“Do it,” Sheppard said, trembling, “fuck, Rodney,” and that was pretty unambiguous, so Rodney fished around and got the lube and a condom and worked a second finger into him. “Now,” Sheppard gasped, “fuck, Rodney, now.” 

It wasn’t a lot of prep but Sheppard wasn’t exactly being hesitant, so Rodney slicked himself up and sank slowly, slowly, into Sheppard’s tight body. “Yeah,” Sheppard panted, “yeah, fuck— yeah _oh_!”

“Yeah,” Rodney said, holding Sheppard’s hips between his hands; he’d obviously just hit the sweet spot, from Sheppard’s reaction, eyes rolling back and whole body shuddering. It was a tricky angle, but he calculated a little and got down to it, working Sheppard’s body over his cock just right. Sheppard wrapped one hand tightly around Rodney’s wrist, and stuck the other hand’s first knuckle into his mouth, biting down to muffle the helpless noises he was making. 

Rodney kept working, hearing with mingled satisfaction and arousal those noises getting louder, more desperate, less controlled. He waited, even as he got closer and closer to losing control himself, until the perfect moment to let go of John’s hip, lick his hand, and wrap it around John’s cock. 

Sheppard made an incredibly affecting, wrenchingly heartfelt noise, somewhere between a shout and a sob, and convulsed as he came long and hard, one hand fisted in the sheets and the other wrapped so tightly around Rodney’s forearm that there would surely be bruises there tomorrow. 

He was beautiful, he was so incredibly beautiful, eyes wide and mouth open and head tipped back, clenched down so tight around Rodney’s cock, bucking and shuddering— it brought Rodney off with stunning suddenness. He shouted as he turned himself inside-out into Sheppard’s body, every nerve shocked into a tingling rush up his spine and back down again. 

“Wow,” he panted when he could see again, and his body was still moving on autopilot, still hitching. Sheppard was visibly dazed, breathing hard and staring blankly. “Holy shit.” 

Sheppard shuddered, gasping for breath, looking so affectingly vulnerable Rodney had to bend down and take his face between his hands and kiss him, slow and gentle and deep. He had no masks, like this, no superficial smirks or fake-annoyance or tight-lipped self-control. He tried and failed to say something, lips moving against Rodney’s mouth, another shiver going through him. 

“You,” Rodney said, and kissed him again, his mouth, then his forehead. He managed to get enough control over himself to pull out, slowly and carefully— he’d gone in with such abandon, but now Sheppard’s body seemed so slender, so fragile, so precious. He wrapped himself around Sheppard, pulling blankets up over them, and kissed Sheppard’s face, cradling him like a priceless delicate thing. 

“Rodney,” Sheppard whispered unsteadily. 

“Mm?” Rodney nuzzled at his neck under his ear, the patch of smooth skin between his hair and his stubble. Sheppard shivered, but not unpleasantly, and put his hand in Rodney’s hair, holding him close. 

They lay like that for a few long minutes, Sheppard running his fingers along the edge of Rodney’s jaw, curling them around the back of his neck. Eventually, though, Sheppard shifted to give Rodney a soft kiss to the mouth. “I gotta get goin’,” he said, and pulled away to sit up. 

His hair was a glorious mess, the flannel shirt unbuttoned and rumpled around his shoulders. He ran his fingers through his hair, disarranging it more dramatically— though, Rodney noted, as it usually did, it fell back into its customary arrangement, more or less, and whether that was by Sheppard’s practiced adjustments or by sheer force of its own intrinsic habit, Rodney hadn’t studied enough to determine. 

“I won’t make you move any heavy boxes,” Rodney said generously. 

“Good,” Sheppard said, smirking. “Catch ya at dinner?”

“Sure,” Rodney said, sitting up to watch him pour himself back into his jeans. They weren’t even that tight, they just fit him well— or maybe it’s that he was just particularly pleasingly shaped, and they showed that a lot better than the baggy BDU trousers he usually wore. “I wish your BDUs fit you like that,” Rodney sighed. 

“Heh,” Sheppard said, “it’d make some of the rock-climbing and other shenanigans we get up to on missions a lot more difficult.”

“More challenging,” Rodney corrected. “More exciting.”

“I’ve never seen you in jeans,” Sheppard said. “I bet your ass looks fantastic.”

“I just look fat,” Rodney said, a little of his good mood dissipating. 

“You’re not wearin’ the right ones, then,” Sheppard said, leaning over on the bed and kissing Rodney, rough, brief, and sweet. “At least your ass looks pretty good in BDUs. I just look like I don’t have one.”

“It’s a secret ass,” Rodney said, and took advantage of Sheppard’s proximity to give him a good grope. 

“Yours isn’t,” Sheppard said, “but a light like that, it’d be a sin to hide it under a bushel.” He stood up, moving away, but as he pulled back he ran his thumb along Rodney’s lower lip. “Dinner,” he said, and turned away. 

“Dinner,” Rodney echoed, watching him leave. Sheppard smirked over his shoulder as he went out the door. 

 

 

_several weeks later_

 

Sheppard walked funny. Rodney was used to it by now, but he still found it kind of entrancing to watch Sheppard’s odd, lithe gait. He kind of strode, almost a swagger. They were discussing nothing of particular import, their usual shooting of the shit, so Rodney had attention to spare to watch the man. And so he saw it, saw the odd hitch as Sheppard hesitated, looked up in surprise to see Sheppard’s eyes squint and face screw up like he was in pain, lips pulling back from his teeth in an abortive grimace. 

Before Rodney could ask what was wrong, Sheppard was already falling. Rodney grabbed for him in alarm, and half-caught him, scrambling to keep from thwacking his head on the tile floor of the hallway. “Sheppard,” Rodney said, really alarmed. 

Sheppard didn’t answer, was totally limp. Rodney eased him awkwardly down— he’d only kept his head from hitting the floor by the expedient of grabbing a handful of his jacket, and it was not a sustainable grip. “Jeez,” Rodney groused, “what’s your deal?”

And then Sheppard started to shake, and it was middle school all over again. Rodney stared in horror for a split second before his conditioning kicked in, honed by years of an epileptic little sister: he whipped his jacket off and shoved it under Sheppard’s head to keep him from knocking his skull on the floor, looked at his watch to note the time, and hit his radio. 

“Beckett,” he said, “Carson, I have a medical emergency, please respond.”

There was no answer, and Sheppard jerked and twitched like a broken puppet, horrible to watch. He had bitten his tongue, and was hissing through his teeth, blood frothing out of his mouth. His convulsions were so violent he slipped off of Rodney’s jacket, so Rodney carefully grabbed his head, careful not to pull too hard or offer too much resistance. “Carson,” Rodney said again into his radio. 

“Dr. Beckett is indisposed,” one of the nurses responded. “Please state the nature and location of your medical emergency?”

“Seizure,” Rodney said, “grand mal, northeast hallway just off the control room.” A couple of passing biologists paused, exclaiming, and one knelt by Rodney and reached out to grab Sheppard’s arms. 

“Stay back,” Rodney snapped. “Don’t touch him.”

“I just want to keep him from thrashing around so much,” the scientist said. 

“You could dislocate his joints if you try,” Rodney said. “Give him space.” He looked at his watch. “Jesus Christ, it’s been over a minute.” He keyed his radio. “Can I get some medical assistance here? I’m serious.”

“Acknowledged,” the nurse said. “Team has already been dispatched.”

The biologists were flattened against the far wall, staring in alarm, and a Marine had joined them. Rodney stared at Sheppard’s utterly blank face, glanced at his watch again— going on for two minutes, he knew more than two minutes was a really bad sign— and as abruptly as it had started, the seizure was over. Sheppard went limp again, and Rodney rolled him carefully into the recovery position, allowing himself the indulgence of wiping the blood away from the corners of his mouth. “A minute and fifty seconds,” Rodney said tightly, checking his watch.

The Marine crouched by Sheppard’s feet. “What happened?” she asked. 

Rodney shook his head. “Hit him out of nowhere. I don’t know.” 

One of the nurses shoved past the Marine, who hastily rose and backed against the wall. “Dr. McKay,” he said. “What can you tell me?”

“Grand mal seizure, duration one minute fifty seconds,” Rodney said, “I don’t think he hit his head. At least he didn’t on the way down, I grabbed him. He might have knocked it around while he was thrashing. It was pretty violent, I’ve never seen one like that, but it was textbook tonic-clonic apart from the violence.”

The nurse looked up from taking Sheppard’s pulse. “Have you seen a lot of seizures?”

“My little sister’s epileptic,” Rodney said, “so yes.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s been about a minute since the seizure ended.”

Sheppard sat up suddenly, uncoordinated and heavy; he fell against Rodney, who caught him. “Hey, hey,” the nurse said, “it’s okay.”

“Whpnd,” Sheppard said, staring in unfocused panic, struggling to get up. Rodney put his arm around Sheppard’s chest, gently restraining him, pulling him down. 

“Sheppard,” he said, “it’s all right, you passed out. You’re okay, nobody’s attacking us.”

Sheppard made a half-hearted attempt to pull away, but Rodney held on and his resistance departed abruptly. “Where’mI,” he slurred, resting his forehead against Rodney’s shoulder, a hand fisting uncoordinatedly in Rodney’s t-shirt.

“Hallway by the control room,” Rodney said. “We were just walking to lunch. Maybe your blood sugar was low.”

Sheppard shook his head. “I ate s’morn’g,” he said, a little clearer. Rodney figured he was probably over the worst of the panic, and let up, allowing Sheppard to sit up and pull away a little. He looked around, noticing the spectators, noticing the nurse. There were a couple of infirmary aides behind him, and a gurney. “Wha’th’fuck.”

“You were under more than two minutes,” Rodney said, grateful that the nurse seemed to understand that it was best to let him do the talking. “You’ve probably bitten your tongue. It’s all right. Does your head hurt?”

Sheppard nodded slightly, looking seriously freaked out. Rodney carefully slid his hand along the back of Sheppard’s head, feeling for a bump or a cut, checking under his hair. Sheppard submitted to it, still blinking, obviously disoriented. Rodney always hated seeing him like this, anything less than fully self-possessed; it made something in his chest twist to see Sheppard’s instinctive panic at any loss of control. The man was seriously tightly-wound, and with apparent good reason.

“I don’t think you hit your head,” Rodney said. “Is it just a headache?”

“Let’s get him back to the infirmary,” the nurse said kindly. “We’ll get you under the scanner and see what’s happened.”

“Okay,” Sheppard said, subdued and unhappy. Rodney could tell from the hunch of his shoulders and the curl of his body that he didn’t like that there were people who had seen him like this. Time to deploy the legendary terror that was Dr. McKay.

“Move along,” Rodney snapped at the biologists and the Marine, and the control room techs who’d trickled in curiously. “There’s nothing to see. Get back to work. Don’t you have anything to do around here?” 

They dispersed. The nurse helped Rodney get Sheppard to his feet. “I c’n walk,” Sheppard said, prickly, but he was visibly unsteady, knees wobbly. Still, he balked at the gurney, and Rodney caught on that he didn’t want everyone to see him being wheeled by. They’d have to go right through the control room to get to the infirmary.

“It’ll take us forever to get there if you do,” Rodney said, forgetting to dial the snappishness back down in his worry. “Take a ride.”

“Actually,” the nurse said, “we can take our time a little bit, since the scanner’s likely to be in use already.”

“Why?” Rodney asked, frowning at him.

“Because at the very moment you called us on the radio, Dr. Beckett had a seizure too,” the nurse said. 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The plot thickens. Rodney doesn't know what the machine does, still, but he's willing to fry the power distribution system to get it shut off if it means Sheppard stops making that noise.

 

“It has to have been something ATA-keyed,” Rodney said. Sheppard was curled sullenly on Rodney’s couch, holding an icepack to his swollen elbow. The elbow, and his teeth-mangled tongue, seemed to be the only lasting damage; he’d bruised the elbow pretty badly at some point in the seizure, but hadn’t hit his head. The scans had come back completely uninformative, so he’d been released and told not to be alone for a few hours. 

But as they’d been scanning Sheppard, Lorne had trailed in, looking pale and resentful, with a panicked Captain Powers with him. He hadn’t had a seizure but he’d been suddenly struck with a blinding, crushing headache— at approximately the same instant the two stronger gene carriers had suffered their seizures. His headache was tapering off, but Powers had been convinced he was having a stroke and had frog-marched him down to the infirmary post-haste. 

Lorne was the strongest artificial gene carrier. The only other natural gene carrier on the mission was Miko Kusanagi, and she hadn’t come back with them from Earth yet. She was doing a three-month rotation on a different project; they’d snapped her up while she was Earthside. 

“Yeah,” Sheppard said, voice a little muffled. Rodney looked over and Sheppard had his eyes covered with one hand. He’d been trying to read one of his stupid golf magazines, and obviously had aggravated his headache. 

“Oh for crying out loud,” Rodney said, and took the golf magazine away. “You can’t read right now.”

“Figured I’d just sorta look at the pictures,” Sheppard mumbled, not moving his hand. 

Rodney moved to stand behind the couch and very, very gently put his fingers into Sheppard’s hair. “Let me,” he said. Sheppard tensed all over, but after a moment slowly let go. Rodney gave him the lightest, gentlest scalp massage of his entire amateur-masseur career, little by little releasing the muscles of his scalp, of his face, of his neck as he deepened his touch. In a little while Sheppard was heavy-headed, sleepy-eyed, and had unclenched his jaw. 

Rodney sat down next to him and pulled his head down so it was resting on his shoulder. “Mmmph,” Sheppard said quietly, muffled in Rodney’s shirt. 

“It’s okay,” Rodney said. 

They sat in silence a few minutes, Sheppard completely limp in Rodney’s grasp. His breathing had gone slow and shallow; he was near sleep. But it hitched occasionally. He was fighting it, he didn’t want to let himself drift off. “It’s okay,” Rodney said again, stroking his soft unfairly-thick hair. 

“You can’t be a pilot if you have seizures,” Sheppard said, very softly, nearly inaudible. “Even one can be enough to ground you forever.”

“This isn’t going to go in your medical record that way,” Rodney said. “Obviously you don’t have epilepsy, if you and two other people had simultaneous reactions to something.”

Sheppard didn’t say anything, but after a long moment he relaxed just a little bit more, and his breathing evened out. Rodney sat there and let him sleep for a long time. When Coleman hailed him on the radio, he eased Sheppard down onto the couch and went out into the hall to answer her.

 

 

“Coleman put together a report of what every single science team was working on at that precise moment,” Rodney said. “There were a lot of things going on, as that was right in the middle of one of the busiest shifts, but she and I went through and narrowed it down. Most of what was going on couldn’t possibly have had any effects, but there were two or three devices undergoing testing or repair that could possibly have emitted some sort of impulse that might have affected the electrical activity of somebody’s brains.”

“While the Ancients were occupying the city,” Coleman said, “they turned on an awful lot of systems that don’t need to be on. Some of them, they didn’t have time to repair. I think that one of the more damaged labs has the device that’s most likely the culprit.”

“What kind of people need to have a device that scrambles brainwaves?” Carson grumbled. 

“Don’t ask me,” Sheppard answered, equally grouchy. 

“At any rate,” Rodney said, “we’re going to have to narrow down what it was. It seems best, to me, if we have the three people most likely to be affected lie down in a safe place while a science team activates each of the devices that could have caused the issue. That way we can eliminate them one at a time. I know,” he said, holding up a hand when Carson made a protesting noise, “I know it’s unpleasant to risk another seizure or headache for you guys, but—“

“You don’t need all three of us to be there,” Sheppard pointed out wearily. “Have the other two go offworld for the duration.”

“No,” Lorne said, “you and Beckett go, and I’ll stay. A headache, while unpleasant, is a great deal less risky and damaging than a full-on seizure.”

“Yeah,” Sheppard said, “but what if it’s not strong enough to trip the headache this time?”

“Then we repeat the process with one of you present,” Lorne said with a shrug. “It’s not like the science teams are risking their bodies by doing it.”

Sheppard didn’t really have an answer for that. “I can’t ask you to do that,” he said finally. 

“I know,” Lorne said. ‘That’s why I volunteered. I mean it, Colonel. You and the doctor go someplace nice, and I’ll let you know if I get a headache.”

 

 

Sheppard came back a little sunburnt, bruised, and muddy. He’d been playing soccer with the Athosian kids again, though their idea of soccer came a lot closer to Calvinball than anything any kind of Earth sports professional would recognize, and Sheppard’s natural anarchistic tendencies generally did little to restore order. 

“This is it, huh?” he asked, standing in the doorway of the lab. It was the third thing they’d tried, because Rodney had been privately certain it was the culprit and wanted to definitively eliminate the others. It had triggered another major headache in Lorne, migraine-level, when they’d repeated the procedure the science team had been doing that day. Poor Lorne was still lying down with a cold compress over his eyes in the infirmary. 

“As far as we can tell,” Rodney said, “it’s some kind of AI.” He pointed over at a thing that looked sort of like a stasis chamber’s lower table, only it didn’t have the upper glass shell. “I’m beginning to suspect that it’s kind of… an assisted consciousness? I think a user hooks in via this interface, here,” he pointed at the table, “and controls the thing directly with his mind. But it’s… it’s not a virtual reality. I’m really not sure what the purpose is, it’s this incredibly complex interface I can’t even begin to parse.”

“Have you hooked anybody into it?” Sheppard asked, wandering over to the table, hands in the pockets of his muddy basketball shorts. He had skinny legs, wiry runner’s calves, and it was so unusual to see him in shorts that Rodney kept staring. His knees were filthy, like he’d slid in the grass on them. It took Rodney’s brain somewhere even filthier (outdoor sex! Semi-public outdoor sex! Sheppard’s mouth on him and wicked eyes and trying to keep quiet up against a tree or something somewhere), and he had to keep wrestling himself back to the matter at hand.

“Of course not,” Rodney snapped. “It messes with the brain’s electrical impulses at city-wide distances, I’m not going to strap somebody in. They’d probably _melt_.”

Sheppard was poking at the restraints on the table. They weren’t exactly restraints, they were all-over studded with electrode-like devices, especially the head one. “Is it busted, or experimental, or what?”

“Busted is my guess,” Rodney said, “given the flood damage. The Ancients didn’t get around to repairing everything. Obviously whatever this was wasn’t a top priority.”

“They fixed our hack job on the environmental controls, though,” Sheppard put in, grinning and (Rodney relaxed inwardly) stepping away from the table. 

“Yes,” Rodney said, remembering the time he’d nearly killed Sheppard with laughter by lying under a console faking an orgasm until Caldwell walked in, “they did.” He was secretly going to miss the blue fingerless gloves Sheppard had worn most of that winter. 

“So you gonna fix this thing just to find out what it’s for?” Sheppard needled, wandering over to the console and looking it up and down intently. But he kept his hands firmly in his pockets, for which Rodney was grateful. He didn’t even like Sheppard being near the thing; the memory of the blood at the corners of that mouth was enough nightmare fuel for Rodney, thanks, without repeating the experience. 

“I doubt it,” Rodney said. “It looks like we can shut it down safely, so I’m just going to collect a little more data and then see if I can’t just deactivate it for now. Maybe sometime if there are no gene carriers in the city we can try to take another look at it, but I don’t think we have enough information about it to make it worth the risk to you guys.” 

Rodney glanced over just in time to see Sheppard shudder. “Yeah,” Sheppard said, “I’m not real psyched about that thing gettin’ in my head again.”

“Getting in your head?” Rodney asked. 

Sheppard looked unsettled, and moved away from the console. “I don’t remember anything in particular,” he said. “But it kind of… I have these kinda… lingering impressions. Just, of things… I don’t understand, I just know I didn’t like it.” 

“Huh,” Rodney said, frowning at the device. “Well, it seems to be mostly inactive, so that shouldn’t happen again. I’ll dismantle it further, to be sure, but I just want to get a few more notes down first.”

“Sure,” Sheppard said, with a shrug. “Hey, I gotta get back, clean up before this afternoon’s debrief with AR-9.”

“Ooh, about the planet with the almost-bananas?” Rodney perked up a little. 

“And the hot chicks, yeah,” Sheppard said. 

“Some gate teams have all the luck,” Rodney groused. 

“Teyla promised us a good one next time,” Sheppard said. He patted Rodney on the shoulder as he walked by, leaving the room. “Catch you at dinner?”

“Yeah,” Rodney said, and smiled down at his tablet. 

 

 

 

The face staring back at him from the mirror was puffy, lined, and had dark circles under its eyes and a rather less-defined jawline than Rodney was strictly happy with. He frowned. He was running himself ragged and it wasn’t necessary. He washed his face and brushed his teeth and thought about the wisdom of saving some of his brainpower for emergencies, maybe toning it down a little with the near-all-nighters. 

He’d spent the last ten hours working on that infernal machine, and was no closer to puzzling out what it could possibly be for. It wasn’t a virtual reality, it wasn’t a training simulator, it wasn’t a medical treatment device as far as they could tell— they had carefully recorded all the data they could from both times it had been activated, and Beckett had suggested that perhaps it was some sort of treatment for neurological disorders, but there was no evidence for that— it just seemed to _cause_ them. 

And it was like two in the morning. Rodney had wanted to get all his figuring done and shut the thing down all in one go, but he just hadn’t made enough progress. He was going to have to take another day, and since he had things he couldn’t put off, it was likely to be two or three days before he could finally turn the thing off. It poked at him, like a crinkly tag on a t-shirt neck, worrying about what the thing could do to Sheppard and Beckett’s brains, and to a lesser extent Lorne’s, if it came spontaneously online. Rodney had throttled down the power so he didn’t think the thing was capable of much, but he’d rest easier once he’d disconnected it from the power grid entirely. 

But he had to stop running himself into the ground like this. He’d hated being back on Earth, hated being back at Area 51, but he’d gotten into the habit of sleeping and eating and taking proper care of himself, there. He’d sort of reluctantly eased into the concept of a normal life, with TV shows one watched routinely. And he’d even sort of let himself imagine becoming the sort of person who had a somewhat-normal, steady relationship— he didn’t know if he could mold Sheppard into a real boyfriend, but he’d started to think about trying. He could’ve lived like that, maybe— long-distance, but not _too_ long-distance, and maybe in a civilian context Sheppard would’ve been amenable to the idea of being seen together. Maybe they eventually could’ve, y’know, _talked_ about things. 

It had been a nice fantasy, anyway. And Rodney didn’t exactly miss Earth, but he missed that fantasy. And he missed Sheppard in civilian clothes. It wasn’t just the jeans, it was the general lack of ironing and shaving, it was the absence of weapons, it was something indefinably softer and more relaxed in his posture, in his demeanor, in his eyes. Sheppard had been miserable on Earth too, but he’d seemed happy with Rodney. 

It wouldn’t be any kind of a normal life— Sheppard was kind of nuts, and in his more honest moments Rodney had to admit he himself wasn’t much better— but surely between the two of them they’d be able to scrape by. 

Or maybe not.

Rodney’s radio blurted static from the bathroom counter, and he picked it up. He was off-shift, but sometimes he monitored the radio anyway. He fit it back into his ear, and a Marine answered the gateroom tech’s check-in kind of mechanically, and silence fell again. An engineer called over to the lab, and the tech on duty there, a bored junior scientist monitoring simulations, answered perfunctorily. The usual middle-of-the-night radio chatter, although Rodney wasn’t sure where that engineer was that he needed to check in. 

Oh, Matthews or Matheson or whoever— he was still plugging away on the ceaseless work of monitoring power flow, and was trying to get another old lab shut down somewhere— Rodney had pulled the main crystal himself, but there were a bunch of independent subsystems that had to be tediously, manually re-routed, evaluated, shut off or kept on depending if there was anything downstream of them that needed them. There were engineers working through that task list round the clock. 

Rodney got his pyjama pants on and unzipped the neck of his pullover, pausing to check his email one more time, leaning over the back of the chair to look at the computer and absorb himself in something. The radio hissed in his ear, then said “Rodney,” in a desperate, blurry voice. “Rodney, shut it off! Rodney!”

Rodney jerked upright, and the on-duty tech said, “Message not received, please clarify?”

“Turn it off!” It was more identifiably Sheppard’s voice, and he sounded panicked, hoarse, completely unlike himself. “Rodney! Please! Oh God!”

“This is McKay,” Rodney said, “is that you, Colonel?”

There was no response, and he ran, barefoot and half-in pyjamas as he was, to the door. “Sergeant Barrowman,” he said to the on-duty tech, “could you send someone to make sure Beckett and Lorne are all right? I think that’s Sheppard, it’s probably the machine that’s been bothering the ATA carriers. I’ll check in once I can establish Sheppard’s condition.”

“Understood, doctor,” the sergeant said. Rodney hesitated a moment, not sure which door was John’s new quarters, but he remembered and hit the door controls. They blinked, but didn’t open. Rodney hesitated a moment, listening to the chatter as the sergeant methodically attempted to hail Beckett, then Lorne, but neither were on duty, so neither responded. He then sent the nearest guard patrols to each of them. Rodney listened for a moment, then hit Sheppard’s door controls again. When there was again no response, he popped the panel off and finessed the door open, replacing the panel before he went inside. 

The room was dark. “Sheppard?” he said, blinking as his eyes adjusted. There was no answer, and he hovered uncertainly for a moment before he moved farther into the room, seeing the tumbled mess of bedding trailing from the bed. It looked like he’d left it in a hurry; he always made the bed. 

Rodney peered down the hallway toward the bathroom, but no light were on there. He turned back, and noticed something moving slightly, a dark flutter underneath the desk. “Sheppard?” He approached the motion nervously, uncertain, but as he drew closer he realized that it was indeed Sheppard, curled into a ball and burrowed under the desk. “John?”

“Make it stop,” Sheppard whispered, throat so tight he squeaked. “Make it—make it stop.”

“Private Unser reporting,” said the headset, “Major Lorne reports that he was asleep but he is experiencing some discomfort, a mild headache.” 

“What’s goin’ on, Doc?” Lorne asked. 

“Sheppard,” Rodney said, ignoring the headset for a moment. He reached in and found Sheppard’s shoulder, grabbed on where his neck and shoulder met. “Hey. Make what stop? Are you all right?”

“In my _head_ ,” Sheppard said thinly. “Stop.” 

“I need Dr. Coleman,” Rodney said. “I need her to shut down the power conduit to Lab 67.”

“Sergeant Peck reporting that Dr. Beckett is unresponsive,” another voice said. “Dr. Cole is coming to see what’s wrong.”

“Dr. Coleman is not presently on duty,” the duty sergeant said.

“Lorne here, I’ll get her,” Lorne said. “Lab 67 is that machine.”

“Yes,” Rodney said, “it is.” 

“Ten-four,” Lorne said. “Over and out.”

“I got it,” Rodney said to Sheppard, pulling him out from under the desk. He’d burrowed in like a dying animal; Rodney called the lights up and saw to his horror that Sheppard’s face was covered in blood. “Oh my God.”

Sheppard made a strangled noise, shuddered violently, and buried his bloody face in Rodney’s shirt. “Make it stop,” he wheezed. “Please— Rodney— don’t do this to me—“ 

“Dr. McKay, Coleman here, I can’t isolate the power conduit to Lab 67 yet,” she said into the headset. “Remember I was having the issue that one of the desalinization tanks was downstream of it, and we’d take it down too if we shut it down there. I thought we weren’t going to shut it down until tomorrow so I didn’t finish the work to isolate it.”

“Take the tank down,” Rodney said, feeling how hard Sheppard was shaking against him. “Take the fucking tank down. Lab 67 is running something that’s melting our gene carriers’ brains from the inside, we’ll sort the tank out later, it’s just got to get shut off _right now_.”

“Understood,” Coleman said, sounding alarmed. 

“Rodney,” Sheppard said, actively writhing, frantic. “I don’t— I don’t wanna see— I don’t—“ 

“Hang in there,” Rodney said, “just a minute, we’re taking it down now.”

Sheppard curled into Rodney, hand wrapping around his arm so tightly it hurt— Rodney realized Sheppard was biting down on a chunk of Rodney’s shirt, like he had that time with his broken shoulder when there had been no help for days and they’d moved them in a jostling cart. This was worse than the seizure had been. 

Sheppard’s whole body went taut and he started to scream, muffled in Rodney’s shirt, a thin horrible mindless sound. 

“Peck to infirmary, Lorne’s down, I need medical assistance, we’re just outside the power distribution room,” and Rodney could hear a commotion in the background— Lorne was screaming too. He could only imagine what was happening to Beckett. 

“Coleman,” Rodney said, “fucking _hurry_ ,” knowing the sounds Sheppard was making would come through as well. 

“I’m yanking that entire power circuit,” Coleman said urgently, “I’ll bring things up one at a time later, I get it!”

“You’ll need Zelenka,” Rodney said. Sheppard thrashed, hard, voice going hoarse, still screaming, then suddenly went limp and silent. 

“It’s down,” Coleman said. “I’ll get Zelenka to help me bring things back up. What the hell, McKay, the thing was inert when we left it tonight!”

“I know,” Rodney said grimly into the radio, cradling Sheppard’s jaw in his hand. Sheppard’s eyes rolled but he was conscious, breathing hard, hands opening and closing weakly. Rodney pushed Sheppard’s hair back away from his face and wiped at his bloody nose with the tail of his ruined shirt. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, are you with me?”

Sheppard groaned weakly, eyes squeezed shut. “It, it hurt,” he said, sounding lost and bewildered.

“It’s shut down now,” Rodney said. “I thought it was shut down before but this time we’ve cut power to the whole area. It can’t possibly turn back on.” He gathered Sheppard into his arms, pulling Sheppard’s face in to rest against his shoulder, and Sheppard fisted his hands weakly in Rodney’s shirt. 

“Okay,” Sheppard breathed. 

“ _Do prdele_ ,” Zelenka said on the radio, “Coleman has fried half the routing crystals, McKay, what the hell was the hurry?”

“It was a goddamned fucking emergency,” Rodney answered savagely, “and can anyone give me a status on Beckett? And maybe send me a medical team? Sheppard’s bleeding from the nose and mouth, I think he’s conscious but he’s in real bad shape.” 

“ _Jezisi_ ,” Zelenka said, “all right, I will fix it, only the power to the infirmary is mostly cut by this you know.”

“Please,” Rodney said, finally taking a moment to let the terror hit him, “fix it, _please_.” This might have done irreparable damage to the brains of his two best friends in the world; God only knew what the damn thing was for, let alone what it was capable of. 

It was apparently a strange enough thing for him to say that Zelenka, for once, had no further commentary. 

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Plot.  
> Pieces come together.
> 
> Also, smut. Because that's one of several ways John Sheppard deals with feelings.   
> Rodney really doesn't mind.

 

 

“We had left the machine in what we presumed was an inactive state,” Coleman said. She looked exhausted, her almond-shaped eyes puffy and her usually-glossy black hair stringy and scraped into a ponytail. Rodney knew she’d been up all night; so had he. Again. “But while the overnight shift was going through the manual shutdown protocols on the neighboring lab, the only thing we can think is that they must have activated it. Our first clue was when Colonel Sheppard tried to hail Dr. McKay on the radio.”

“I see,” Elizabeth said slowly. She turned to Sheppard, who was sitting across from her at the conference table. 

If Coleman looked tired, Sheppard looked worse. He had a bruise on his cheekbone, dark circles under his eyes, and was slouching in his chair looking for all the world like a man with a three-day whiskey bender hangover. Even his hair was much flatter than usual. “I was asleep,” Sheppard said hoarsely. “I kind of get nightmares a lot, so that was what I figured was goin’ on, only my head started hurtin’ somethin’ fierce, bad enough that it woke me up— and it was like, it wasn’t like a regular headache. And I was still… seein’ things. Like the nightmares. But not— I usually have nightmares about stuff that really happened to me, y’know? And these were things that never happened. Not to me.”

“Yeah,” Lorne said. “I was dreaming about… the damnedest things.” He looked pretty rough too, eyes shadowed and face haggard. 

“Me too,” Beckett said. “Only I didn’t wake up at all.”

“I woke up and was okay,” Lorne said, “until Dr. Coleman was trying to shut the thing down, and suddenly it felt like there was a railroad spike through my head. But yeah— the stuff I’d been dreaming about, I was still kinda seeing it. I just figured it was the abrupt awakening.”

“So the pain woke you,” Elizabeth said to Sheppard. 

“Yeah,” Sheppard said. “And I figured pretty quick that it had to be that goddamn machine. Because it wasn’t— Lorne’s right about the railroad spike kinda feelin’, except not quite. I felt like it was more… invasive than that. Like, getting a nail shoved lengthwise up into each nerve. Like every single little bit of your mind gettin’ individually violated.”

“That’s disturbingly precise,” Rodney said. 

“And accurate,” Beckett said, audibly unsettled. He looked no better than either of the other two affected people.

“So I kinda crawled across the room and got my headset and hailed McKay because I was basically incoherent,” Sheppard said. “So there’s your timeline for the sequence of events.”

“Can you tell us more about the nightmares,” Elizabeth asked carefully, “since it seems that all of you had very similar ones?”

“They felt like memories more than like dreams,” Beckett said. 

“Yes,” Lorne said, and Sheppard nodded. “In, in mine,” Lorne went on in a moment, “I— I was in the dream, but the thing is, I felt like I wasn’t really me— or, the person who was me, wasn’t really the person that I am? I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Oh,” Beckett said, “but I know what you mean, aye— and the more so since in some of the dreams I saw, there were two of me.”

Sheppard was watching them, calculating, not saying anything, and Rodney _knew_ , down in his bones, that Sheppard had it figured out and was waiting to see if they backed him up before he spoke. Lorne glanced over at him and he just nodded encouragingly. 

“In at least one of them,” Lorne said, “um… Colonel Sheppard killed me.”

Sheppard’s hair did the thing where it shifted backward so that his eyebrows had the appearance of going downward, though they didn’t actually change their location on his skull, the rest of his scalp and face moved around them. “I saw that one too,” he said. “I killed you. Only I know it wasn’t me.”

“Were we in the SGC?” Lorne asked, sort of warily. 

“Yes,” Sheppard said. “It was just after the part, in my dream, where my ex-wife passed along a Gou’auld symbiote to me, and the snake forced me to kill her, abduct my son— in this dream I had a kid— and go to the SGC, where I killed you and enacted some sort of plan where I took over the world.”

“Oh! Yeah,” Lorne said, intense, “your eyes did the gold flash thing, I noticed it but I was too busy freaking out because you stabbed me.”

“Yeah,” Sheppard said. “If it’s any consolation that part freaked me the fuck out too.”

“You’re saying you both had the same dream,” Elizabeth said. 

“Stabbed you in the neck, right?” Sheppard said. Lorne gestured, and both men pointed to the same spot, just above the collarbone on the left side of the neck. 

“That’s fuckin’ creepy,” Rodney said. 

“You were in it too, Dr. McKay,” Lorne said. 

“Yeah,” Sheppard said, “you were.” He looked resigned, and didn’t make eye contact. “I killed you too.”

“Yeah,” Lorne said, with a grimace. “It was after you killed me. I sorta felt like I shouldn’t’ve still been in the dream at that point, but I was.”

“Oh my God,” Elizabeth murmured, fascinated. 

“The weirdest thing about all of this,” Beckett said, “is that I had the same dream even though I wasn’t in it at all.”

“Spill,” Rodney said to Sheppard, tired of not being the one in the room who knew what was going on. “You’ve figured this out and you’re waiting for us to catch up. And we’re not, we’re just getting freaked out. So spill it.”

Sheppard looked startled. Yes okay, Rodney wasn’t supposed to be good enough with people to have picked up on Sheppard’s tells the way Sheppard had picked up on his, but he wasn’t really willing to sustain the illusion any further, not after the couple of days he’d had and with the bruises from Sheppard’s hand circling his forearm. 

Expression shading to resigned, Sheppard sighed and said, “Nobody else got any kind of data readouts?”

“Data readouts,” Beckett said flatly. Lorne shook his head, eyebrows speaking volumes about his confusion. 

“Not so much text,” Sheppard said, “as, kind of, impressions of information? Kind of overlaid over… no?”

The others shook their heads. 

Sheppard sighed again. “Alternate universes.”

“What?” But Rodney was letting it fall into place, and he whipped out his tablet and called up the readings from the device’s three activations and began looking for something very specific. 

“Alternate universes,” Sheppard said. “The so-called dreams. They were definitely alternate universes. Because I remember Rod, and how he was like Rodney but not quite? I was like me, but not quite. There was the universe where I had a kid and caught a bad case of the snakes from my ex-wife, yeah, but before that there were bits of one where I wasn’t in the Air Force at all, and one where I know I had died years ago, or so the data informed me— killed in action in Afghanistan 2002, which isn’t that far off at all— and one where I was a burned-out hobo. And in all of them I saw events that had to do with the Stargate. And there were data… impressions with each, that told me… well, things I didn’t really understand, but things like, in one of the realities, I had a different middle name and a different birth date by a week or so, and in another I’d had my spleen removed after an injury, and …” He trailed off, gesturing with a shrug. “That kind of thing.”

“Yup,” Rodney said, finding what he was looking for. “That is a very plausible explanation and is borne out by some of the more puzzling readings we got from that machine. I thought it was just massive interference, but this radiation signature here is very similar in certain aspects to the signature we got off that matter bridge. This is a machine that interacts with alternate universes somehow.”

“Oh my God,” Elizabeth said. “That’s _fascinating_.”

“Yes,” Rodney said, “it is, but it’s also too great a risk to continue studying it. I can devote some resources to analyzing it with the power still cut, but I am unwilling to so much as connect power to that room if there are any gene carriers anywhere on this planet.”

“That’s unusually conservative, for you,” Elizabeth pointed out. 

Rodney just stared at her. 

She cleared her throat. “Well,” she said. “I would love to read a report on what you’ve got, as soon as you have that assembled. In the meantime, though, I think pretty much everyone in this room needs to get some rest. So give me that report at your leisure, Rodney.” 

 

 

 

Rodney managed to get Sheppard into his bed, even though they hadn’t said he needed to be under observation. For some reason the part that horrified him most in all this was the brief eternity Sheppard had spent crawling across his floor trying to get to his radio headset to beg Rodney to deactivate the device. If they’d still shared a wall Rodney might have been able to hear him faster. Probably not, but he couldn’t shake the guilt, and it was sort of an unusual feeling for him. 

Sheppard curled up in his bed, subdued and tired, and Rodney gave him another scalp massage. “I’m sorry it hurt you so much,” Rodney murmured finally, knowing Sheppard was still awake by his breathing. Of all the things he’d expected to learn on this mission, how to gauge a colleague’s condition by his breathing alone wasn’t high on the list. 

“Not your fault,” Sheppard answered. Rodney wanted to turn him around, pull his head into his chest, kiss him, but they weren’t doing that right now, he was just being the big spoon. 

“Still,” Rodney said. The desire to comfort Sheppard was a very strange ache.

Sheppard sighed and stretched, rolling his head on his neck, working out kinks. He was wearing an old t-shirt (it was Air Force blue and said “Aim High!” and Rodney couldn’t tell if it was ironic or not) and the least obnoxiously-nylon of his track pants. “You were in a lot of the alternate universes,” he said quietly, rolling onto his back and wriggling carefully back into Rodney’s grasp, pressing his shoulder into Rodney’s chest, hip against Rodney’s groin, flank to belly, thigh to thigh. Rodney let himself slide his bent knee across Sheppard’s thigh.

“Did I have a Nobel in any of them?” Rodney asked, both genuinely curious and knowing that it would amuse Sheppard.

Sheppard smiled. “Not that I saw,” he said. “I got the feeling that most of these were realities very close to ours, where not much was different.”

“It wouldn’t have to be very different for me to have a Nobel,” Rodney pointed out. 

That got him an actual fond look, which warmed him considerably. “Of course not,” Sheppard said. “So you probably did, I just didn’t see.”

“Did I have any more hair in any of them?” Rodney asked. 

“See,” Sheppard said, more animated suddenly, “there’s the thing. I was most definitely not seeing straight-up current events. I was seeing things that were definitely taking place at different dates in those other realities— not all of them had date information that I could make out, but the one with the snake, the one we all saw, that one definitely was taking place at a future date. Again, it’s sort of a feeling. But if this fuckin’ machine can see not only other universes, but also the _future_ in other universes? What if it can see the future in this reality? It just seems like… we _have_ to study it, Rodney.”

“It’s too dangerous,” Rodney said. 

“I think it’s too dangerous _not_ to,” Sheppard said. 

“It hurts you,” Rodney said. 

“I’ll happily get exiled to the alpha site or farther, if it means you can figure out how to see the future,” Sheppard said. 

“It’s an incredibly complex device,” Rodney said. “It makes Project Arcturus look like a third-grade science fair project.”

“It has to be a lot less dangerous than Project Arcturus,” Sheppard pointed out. “Or they wouldn’t have had it right here in the city.”

“Yeah, I dunno,” Rodney said. He smoothed his hand across Sheppard’s chest, feeling the warmth of his skin through his t-shirt. “Except the part where it’s broken.”

“Yeah, ok,” Sheppard conceded. “The bit where it rapes my brain is an issue.”

“I’m not fond of that part,” Rodney said. “You bit through my shirt again.”

“I did?” Sheppard’s eyebrows went up. “Sorry. I’ll fix it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Rodney said, “I can just requisition another one.” They no longer had to mend and make do, the way they had when cut off from Earth. And while it was a lot less of a pain in the ass this way, Rodney sometimes sort of guiltily missed the homemade clothes and weirdly gone-native aesthetic. Sheppard in particular had looked very fetching in homespun.

“Huh,” Sheppard said, nestling in closer. Rodney wriggled his lower arm under Sheppard’s neck, and slid the upper arm down around his waist. “Well, I wasn’t really— I was kind of distracted.”

“The thing is,” Rodney said, “that without you we can’t really investigate the machine. As far as we could tell it was just giving off weird energy signatures. The end point of the interface seems to be directly inside a gene carrier’s brain. If you hadn’t been able to receive the information we’d never know what the damn thing did.”

“True,” Sheppard said. He sighed, a little wistfully. “Maybe if I go offworld for a while and you guys kinda… fix it a little. I’m sure it’s not supposed to do what it does in terms of, y’know, triggering every pain receptor in your entire brain.”

Rodney shook his head. “I’m sure it’s not,” he said, “but I’ve got about as much chance of figuring out what’s wrong that makes it do that as I have of being elected Pope.”

Sheppard let out a breath, almost a sigh. “I guess,” he said. “I just, I feel like this machine is really important.”

“Did your other selves all have better lives than you do?” Rodney asked. “Hotter girlfriends? Better-paying jobs? More glory?”

Sheppard shook his head, apparently taking Rodney seriously. “It wasn’t that,” he said. “Though Rod’s Sheppard doesn’t know how good he had it— I don’t think my mom was alive in any of the universes I saw last night.”

“But she was in his?” Rodney asked. Sheppard had never actually really mentioned either of his parents before, that Rodney could remember— nothing about his family, either, and Rodney had sort of been content to absent-mindedly believe that Sheppard had sprung fully-formed, issues and hair and all, out of an egg or something.

“Yeah,” Sheppard said. 

He’d probably been an adorable kid.

Rodney considered all of that for a long moment. “If you could,” he said, “would you go visit her?”

“In another universe?” Sheppard squirmed a little. “No, it would be weird, I think. For her and for me. I just think it would…” 

“I probably would,” Rodney said, “but I don’t think it would go well. I just don’t think I’d be able to resist.”

“It wasn’t her,” Sheppard said, “that… that I…” He shook his head. “But it was so weird, to… to see.”

“The kid.” Rodney realized what had Sheppard so tied up in knots. “You’re freaking out about the kid.”

“He was in a lot of the universes,” Sheppard said, the words rushing out like a dam had broken. “Like, almost all of them. Except in one he was a girl.”

“I guess I get why that would freak you out,” Rodney said. 

Sheppard swallowed, hard; he was really upset about this. Rodney tightened his arms around him. He’d never have guessed any of this. “Almost the same birthdate in every reality,” he went on quietly. 

“Same mom?” Rodney asked. 

Sheppard gave him a disgusted look. “Yes,” he said, like it was obvious.

“I don’t know,” Rodney said defensively. “You don’t ever talk about your life. For all I know, you had a harem or something.”

“No,” was all that Sheppard answered, and he was quiet for a long time. Just when Rodney thought he’d clammed up for good, though, he went on, very quietly, “In every universe he was either named Joseph or George.”

“Even the girl one?” Rodney asked, knowing as he said it that it was a feeble attempt at levity and Sheppard probably wouldn’t be amused. 

“No,” Sheppard said, too deep in reflection to bother finding Rodney annoying, “she was named for my mom.”

“Oh,” Rodney said. He devoted a moment’s thought to trying to figure out why Sheppard was so hung up on this. “Then who are Joseph and George?”

“My grandpa,” Sheppard said, “the one that was good to me, and… her dad.” He glanced over at Rodney, then away before any expression could register. “He died right after we got married. He was a really good guy.” He shook his head. “I didn’t get any data on whether he was alive in any of the realities.”

By _her_ he must mean the child’s mother, though who that would be, Rodney really didn’t know. He remembered Sheppard mentioning a wife once, but beyond thinking how weird that seemed, Rodney hadn’t given it much thought. 

“So,” Rodney said, “in those other universes, are you— you must be on Atlantis.”

Sheppard shook his head. “In most of them, the expedition hadn’t left yet. And in some of them I wasn’t even in the Air Force.” He looked over at Rodney again, a little longer this time. “You’re askin’ because you wanna know if I’m even raisin’ the kid,” he said. 

“No, no,” Rodney said, but that was, actually, it. The very idea of Sheppard as a parent was so profoundly at odds with everything he felt like he knew about the man, it boggled the mind. Though, the guy _was_ good with kids, was the thing. Every pack of refugees, every village, all those missions with the damn stuffed animals— Sheppard was a kid magnet, kids loved him, and he loved them right back in his weird indirect kind of shy way. Rodney had just never really thought about it, had never made the leap from inwardly sniggering _it’s because they’re on his level_ to realizing _he’s a guy who likes kids_. But even now, it was easy to summon to mind the image of Sheppard, in full BDUs and tac vest, P-90 hanging from its clip, holding a small infant cradled against his shoulder as if he did it every day, rocking slightly and murmuring to it, watching while Beckett gave the mother an immunization.

“Yes,” Sheppard said. “For the record.” He seemed a little offended. 

“Jeez,” Rodney said, “I’m not tryin’ to be a jerk, I just— it seems like those universes are kinda far from this one.” And then it hit him, what must be upsetting Sheppard so much. “Oh. Should I— what about _this_ universe? Where’s… where is he?”

Sheppard visibly collected himself, staring at the ceiling and biting both lips by turn. Okay, he was _really_ upset. “I did the math,” he said. “The birthdate would’ve probably been about the same.”

“Would’ve,” Rodney said, something heavy collecting under his breastbone. 

“He wasn’t born,” Sheppard said. “He never— there wasn’t.” He breathed. “If I couldn’t be a husband to her then I couldn’t really be much of a father either, so there wasn— she—“ He collected himself. “It was her choice. And we got a divorce instead. And that was that.” 

“Oh,” Rodney said. He’d just figured Sheppard wasn’t good at relationships, but that sounded complicated. 

“And all those other versions of me,” Sheppard went on in a moment, “every one of them, they all found a way to make it work.”

_Oh._ Rodney looked, and Sheppard’s face was fiercely blank, tight— he was pretty profoundly upset. “Sheppard,” he said awkwardly. 

“I didn’t even really try,” Sheppard said angrily. “I just— I assumed there was nothing I could do, and just— I just gave up, Rodney, and walked away, and that’s who I am, that’s what this universe is— it’s the universe where John Sheppard just fucking _gives up_.”

“That’s not true,” Rodney said. Sheppard’s body was taut and stiff in his arms, wound up with tension. “What about the one where you’re a hobo?”

“I didn’t give up in that one,” Sheppard said. “I was still fucking fighting, in that one. I was nuts, yeah, and totally ineffective, and everything had been taken from me, but I didn’t give up.”

Rodney sighed, and tightened his grip around Sheppard’s waist. “You might not be what’s different, though,” he said, on a stroke of inspiration. “What if it’s that _she_ was different in this universe? You said it was her choice. Maybe she just chose differently, in the other ones. It might not even have anything to do with you.”

“I doubt it,” Sheppard said, but some of his tension eased. 

“I don’t,” Rodney said loyally. He kissed Sheppard’s temple, and they lay there in silence for a while, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. Rodney let himself play with Sheppard’s hair. It was so soft, so thick, cool and glossy to the touch but warm down by his scalp.

“I _would_ go visit _him_ ,” Sheppard said. “Not my mom, but… I’d go visit him.” 

Rodney didn’t have to ask who _he_ was. 

After another little while, Sheppard pulled away and slid down under the covers. He took Rodney apart slowly, starting with his mouth and moving on to use his tongue and fingers, and kept him right up on the edge, unbearably close, for so long Rodney was pretty convinced he could see other universes too. Rodney begged and pleaded, and finally Sheppard took pity on him and gave him the combination of pressure, friction, and suction he needed to finally release. 

He came in a blinding rush, and in the midst of it, of pleasure so intense it was like he was outside of his body, he suddenly had an epiphany about the machine’s circuitry, the way it interfaced— he understood, suddenly, how it was able to project information directly into a compatible mind, and he understood where, most likely, the damage was likely to be that made it behave in such an incorrect way. 

“Oh my God,” he said, “oh my God, oh— oh my God—“

Sheppard crawled back up the bed, hovering over him on hands and knees, mouth gorgeously red and swollen and wet. “Rodney,” he said, obviously so turned-on he could barely stand it; his arm muscles were trembling, and he let himself down, the length of his body warm and heavy against Rodney’s, his erection riding in the crease of Rodney’s thigh. “Rodney.” 

Rodney grabbed Sheppard’s ass, shoving his track pants down, and pulled his dick out so that it rubbed hot and hard against his bare skin. “Yeah,” he said, his epiphany still settling out in sparks behind his eyes, “c’mon.” Sheppard deserved a good orgasm for that truly inspirational blowjob. 

Sheppard rubbed off on him, quick and desperate, almost frantic, and Rodney pulled his face down and licked and bit his gorgeous, gorgeous lips, tasted himself on that beautiful mouth, reveled in the slide of that lean, taut body against his, that hot, hard cock, and in almost no time at all Sheppard shoved his face into the crook of Rodney’s neck and came all over his belly with a series of nearly-soundless gasps— “Ah— ah— ah— ahh!” 

“Yes,” Rodney murmured, “Sheppard, yeah,” and Sheppard collapsed slowly onto him, face buried in the hollow where his neck met his shoulder. 

“Rodney,” Sheppard said blurrily, almost plaintively, and Rodney held him and kissed his neck, his shoulder, and lay beneath him as he grew slowly heavier, sliding off into sleep. 

Rodney slid off toward sleep slowly, as well, working out wiring diagrams in his head until he dreamed of it. 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rodney makes John a present.  
> Then he screws everything up.  
> Then maybe he fixes it. Maybe?  
> (Roughly concurrent with The Game, The Ark.)
> 
> [Slight warning for not-exactly-dubcon, but one of the participants in a sexual encounter is not actually awake and is vividly dreaming. He's dreaming he's with the person he's with, he's just rather confused, and is a little embarrassed afterward when the other participant catches on and calls him on it. Very mild, but probably worth bracing yourself for if that kind of thing squicks you a little.]

 

 

 

“I’m sorry,” Rodney said, sitting down next to Sheppard on the pier. 

Sheppard looked up from his contemplation of the fading sunset. “Huh?” 

Rodney mentally backtracked. Well, in his head it had been an ongoing conversation and he’d already worked through the backstory. “Oh. Um, the alternate universe machine. When I was, you know,” and he gestured next to his head, in what was surely by now a universally-accepted sign for being a genetically-accelerated super-genius, “I figured I could make some better headway on it, and I started work, but I didn’t keep good enough notes and I just can’t figure out where I was going with it.”

“Oh,” Sheppard said, and pulled a beer off the plastic rings and handed it to Rodney. 

“I mean, I had a kind of a breakthrough before the whole, you know, super-genius thing started,” Rodney said, “and I was pretty sure how I could bypass the part where it, you know, shoved virtual nails into your mind. But then I got superpowers, and decided that just that wouldn’t be enough, I was going to improve the whole thing and give it an interface that even a non-native ATA carrier could use. And I sort of, well. I didn’t finish it, and I don’t know how to take it back to where it was before.”

Sheppard took a long pull from his can of beer. “Too bad,” he said. 

It was impossible to tell whether he were really as unaffected as he seemed. Rodney cracked his own can open and took a drink, watching Sheppard in vain for any sign. The guy had been pretty insistent about that machine. And he wasn’t wrong, it would be incredibly useful. Even back to his normal level of intelligence, Rodney could understand that it was incredibly powerful, and hadn’t been fully developed by the Ancients before they’d left the city. And he could understand where his super-genius self might have been going with it. But he’d gotten too excited in the process, and just hadn’t left notes he could follow now. 

“You could get it to show you universes filtered by various factors,” Rodney said. “That was what they were working on. It wasn’t finished when it was abandoned, but it still worked well enough. It’s underpowered, and the interface is absolutely terrible. I think even in good working condition, it wouldn’t be totally safe to use. When I powered it up while I was a genius, I had to take most of the interface offline and kind of hack remotely at it with a computer instead, which gave me pretty much text-only output, which I could understand in that state but now I really haven’t the slightest idea…” He sighed, trailing off and waving his hand dismissively. “At least the interface is isolated from the rest of it, so no matter what, that bit can’t come randomly on and make your brains bleed out your ears.” 

“Well,” Sheppard said, “that’s comforting to know.”

“You could sort the universes by degrees of similarity,” Rodney went on, “and you could key the search to one particular thing, to find all the universes that have a particular thing in common. The thing is, it’s not going to be a comprehensive list. The machine wasn’t powerful enough to search all possible universes and index them. So what it would do would be to take that one particular thing you put in— say, all the universes where I get a Nobel Prize— and present them. The thing is, it’s such an insanely complex thing to sort that way— because first, of course, it has to find all the universes where there is a recognizable ‘me’, and then has to— well, it’s complicated. And sometimes, you were right, there’s a bit of fluidity with the timeline. I was totally unable to figure out how the hell that worked— not because I wasn’t smart enough, of course, but because I just couldn’t get it to give me enough information.”

“So it was showin’ me all the universes where, what?” Sheppard looked at him, still unreadable. “I don’t remember clearly enough to know what they all had in common.” 

“I couldn’t access a log of prior searches,” Rodney said. He’d wondered that too, himself. 

“Hm,” Sheppard said. He finished his beer, set the can down, and popped another one off the plastic rings. 

“But anyway,” Rodney said, “there’s a consolation prize in all this.”

“A consolation prize,” Sheppard said, turning his head to regard Rodney again. This time he looked slightly amused, which was better than the earlier blankness. 

Rodney flipped open the cover of his tablet and pulled out the little device he’d been carrying just under the cover. It was about the size of a credit card, and about a half-centimeter thick. “Nearly-Ascended-Me, building on some ideas I had earlier as Normal Genius Me, might I point out, came up with a simplified, smaller version of the mental control interface, and as a proof of concept, left a pretty decent set of blueprints for this baby. I knocked it together and I’m pretty pleased with it.”

Sheppard regarded the device trepidatiously. Its casing was made from cannibalized panel pieces from a fried laptop, and Rodney had done rather an artistic job of using the bit with the Pegasus logo from the center of the upper cover, if he did say so himself. The edges blinked with tiny colored lights, and the interior, Rodney knew, was all repurposed pieces of Ancient crystal. “What does it do?” Sheppard asked. 

“It’s a, um,” Rodney paused. “Well, I didn’t name it. But what it does is it detects nightmares and flashbacks and things, and interacts with your brainwaves to kind of, calm you down, snap you out of it. It’s almost impossible to describe in layman’s terms, and it was fantastically complex to work out.” 

“What happens if I touch it?” Sheppard asked, staring at it in fascination. 

“Nothing perceptible, really, while you’re awake,” Rodney said. “It is specifically designed not to interfere with waking brainwaves. But it turns out that there’s a whole section in the Ancient database full of analysis of the different patterns of human brainwaves, including a really big section on trauma, post-trauma, and the like. The funniest part is that it’s very sort of 101-like, like this is common knowledge and everyone knows this so here’s the basics, and then it goes on from there. I’ve pulled it out and flagged it for Beckett, or Heightmeyer, or whoever— it probably has the potential to revolutionize the psychiatric industry.”

“Wait, so that thing can tell if you’re having a panic attack or a flashback or a nightmare,” Sheppard said, and he sounded dubious but Rodney knew that meant he was really intrigued. 

“Yes,” Rodney said. “It can detect those distinctive patterns of cerebral activity, and can mitigate them.”

“How does it… mitigate them?” Sheppard asked, eyes narrowed.

“That’s the bit that I stole from the alternate universe machine,” Rodney said. “It modulates them, eases them back into more normal patterns, gives you calming and grounding images.” 

“How does it know what images you’d find calming and grounding?” Sheppard asked. “Are we talking, like, New Age music and like whale songs and pictures of sunsets, or what?”

“No, no,” Rodney said. “There’s, well, it has to be initialized and scan your waking mind for a baseline. You should probably, oh, meditate with it, or something. You know.” 

“What, _I_ should?” Sheppard asked. 

“Well,” Rodney said, “yeah.”

“Why me?” Sheppard regarded the thing, still sitting atop Rodney’s hand, with some hesitance. 

“Because I made it for you,” Rodney said. 

Sheppard stared at him. “You made it for me,” he said. 

Rodney lifted his chin, a little self-conscious. “Of course,” he said. “You’re the most proficient gene carrier, so you’d be best to test the prototype.” At Sheppard’s raised eyebrows, he continued, a little less haughty, “And your nightmares are really bad sometimes and I felt like there ought to be something I could do about that. Something more lasting than wrestling you down and snuggling you until you stop thrashing.” 

Sheppard was still staring at him, but his mouth had gone from a flat line to slightly open, lips pursed just a little bit, eyebrows back to level, slightly drawn-together in the middle. “You made it for _me_ ,” he said, and it was a completely different shade of blank than his earlier flatness. He looked… 

He looked touched, actually. 

“Here,” Rodney said, and held out the device.

Sheppard took it gingerly between his fingers and turned it over in his hands. “You,” he said, “made me this.” 

“Yes,” Rodney said, really self-conscious now. “I, it— it seemed like the least I could do with what I learned from the machine that almost melted your brain.”

Sheppard turned the little machine over again, and traced the solder around the edges— Rodney had done rather a neat job on it, better even than his normal excellent standards— and ran a finger across the salvaged Pegasus on the top. “It sort of buzzes,” he said thoughtfully. “So I— what? Think happy thoughts at it?” 

“Carry it around in your shirt pocket,” Rodney said, “and let it get your baseline readings. Try not to have any angry conversations while it’s still calibrating, I think. But then try sleeping with it, like, under your pillow or something. It should be pretty durable, let me know if it’s not. And let me know if you have any bad nightmares or anything.”

Sheppard held it flat between his palms, blinking absently into middle distance. “You made me a dream machine,” he said. 

“You should maybe sleep in my room tonight,” Rodney said, a little nervously. “Just in case it— it doesn’t work like I expected.”

Sheppard looked at him, and gave him one of those slow fond smiles that kind of crawled across his mouth from one side to the other. “Okay,” he said. 

 

 

 

 

Rodney woke to Sheppard’s hand on his dick, Sheppard’s mouth on his neck, and Sheppard’s erection riding hot and hard along the crease where his thigh met his groin. “Oh,” he said, “aahmph,” as Sheppard kissed him, hungry and already frantic, most of the way there already, and Rodney went from absently half-hard to pretty much all the way there himself. “Oh wow,” he said, dazed, as Sheppard pinned him down with his body, yanking at clothes until bare skin touched bare skin, hand around both their cocks now, moving firm and purposeful and starting to shade toward desperate, close, Sheppard’s hips hitching as he fucked down against Rodney’s body. 

Sheppard made an inarticulate noise, breathing raggedly into the crook of Rodney’s neck. “Yeah,” Rodney said, “c’mon, yeah,” lifting his hips encouragingly into the contact. Sheppard shuddered, made a few more firm strokes, and then he shuddered again, harder, making another non-word noise as he came, dick throbbing against Rodney’s. 

Rodney grabbed his ass as he shook, and craned his neck sideways to catch his mouth. “Yeah,” he gasped, thrusting into the sticky wet heat of Sheppard’s slightly distracted hand, “oh, oh yeah,” and even though he’d been sound asleep and not even dreaming a moment before, he was already coming too, moaning into Sheppard’s mouth. 

Sheppard’s mouth slid into a tender, sweet kiss, his other hand coming up to cradle Rodney’s cheek. He made another inarticulate noise, maybe a series of them, not quite murmuring, and Rodney came to himself enough to realize that Sheppard wasn’t exactly coherent.

Rodney blinked up at him. Sheppard’s eyes were open enough to glint in the faint moonlight from the window, but they didn’t really look like they were focusing on anything. “Sheppard?” Rodney said. 

“Lrmmphhugh,” Sheppard said blurrily, more or less sliding sideways off Rodney, putting his face into the pillow. He was still breathing hard. 

“Sheppard,” Rodney tried again, still panting a little himself. He wiped Sheppard’s hand off on his own shirt— Sheppard was naked, somehow, when he hadn’t been when they’d gone to sleep. 

“Hmmmn,” Sheppard answered, wrapping an arm around Rodney and pulling him in close. He kissed Rodney’s shoulder, put his head back down, and sighed as his body relaxed into limpness. 

Rodney managed to get a glimpse of the bedside clock. It was about 3:30 am, which was a pretty typical time for Sheppard to wake Rodney up only usually it was with nightmares, and Rodney’s only-normal-human-genius brain drew a connection. 

“You’re having a sex dream instead of a nightmare,” Rodney said. 

“Nngr?” Sheppard grumbled, not moving. 

“For the record,” Rodney told him, “I didn’t mean to make a machine that would make you hump me.”

Sheppard sighed heavily, rolled back a little, and peeled bleary eyes open to look up at Rodney. “What?”

“You just totally humped me in your sleep,” Rodney said. 

“What?” Sheppard gave him an annoyed look. “What the hell are you talking about? I was awake.”

“You so were not,” Rodney said. 

“We just had a whole conversation,” Sheppard said, shoving up onto an elbow. Rodney could see his face clearer now. 

“You haven’t actually said one coherent word,” Rodney said, “up until that ‘what’ just now.”

Sheppard blinked at him, cross. “We just had, and it was— and you said—“ He blinked, and something came down behind his face like a shutter. “Oh.” 

“You were dreaming,” Rodney said. 

“Of course I was,” Sheppard said, and he looked flat and blank, but there was something unmistakably sad underneath that. 

“It’s okay,” Rodney said, finally waking up enough himself to realize that perhaps he was killing Sheppard’s good-dream buzz. “It’s not like I was offended. It was kinda hot. But you were totally dreaming.”

“Yeah,” Sheppard said a little bleakly, “I was.” He rolled over, and rather than letting him continue the gesture and get out of bed, Rodney grabbed him around the chest and pulled him back down. 

“It’s okay,” Rodney said. “I didn’t mean— I wasn’t yelling at you.”

Sheppard was tense and unyielding under his arm. “I wasn’t trying to— I didn’t mean to wake you up,” he said stiffly. 

“Of all the ways to wake up, you’re probably the nicest,” Rodney said, knowing it was a mushy thing to say and saying it anyway. Very occasionally, being mushy with Sheppard paid off in small but significant ways, and not just in bed. He was still lit up a little inside at the way Sheppard had been so touched that Rodney’s brainwave machine had been made primarily for him— and it was the smile, not the truly awesome blowjob right before bed, that was still warming him. It wasn’t easy to make Sheppard smile like that. 

Sheppard’s shoulders did loosen a little bit, at that, but he didn’t roll over. “You think the machine did that?” he asked. 

“Maybe?” Rodney answered. “You often have nightmares at this hour but that’s the first time you’ve sleep-humped me.” 

A little tightness returned and Rodney mentally cursed himself. God, he was bad at this. “I didn’t,” Sheppard said, “I thought I was awake. It was very convincing.”

Rodney kissed the back of Sheppard’s shoulder. “You mean you were dreaming about me, huh?” he asked, blatantly fishing.

“Of course I was,” Sheppard said, but he didn’t really sound irritated so much as he did… well, just _sad_ , like it had been a good conversation and he was sorry it hadn’t been real. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in somebody’s sex dream before,” Rodney said lightly. 

“It wasn’t, like, a crazy sex dream,” Sheppard said. Okay, maybe he sounded embarrassed, which wasn’t really any better than irritated. Rodney kissed him again. “It was just, I was sleeping next to you and I woke up and we fucked and then we had a nice conversation. I guess I should’ve known, it was a little out of character.”

“I can have nice conversations,” Rodney said, grasping at straws. “What’d I say that was so nice?”

“Nothin’,” Sheppard muttered. “Hey c’mon, I only got an hour and a half more to sleep.”

“Then come here,” Rodney said, insistent. 

Sheppard sighed, turned onto his back, and let Rodney kiss him. “Fine,” he said. 

 

 

 

 

John dreamed again before he woke for the day. This dream was a lot less detailed, but it took him most of his morning run, pushing harder than he usually did, to forget how goddamn good it had felt. He’d dreamed that he was asleep in bed, just like he really was, and that Rodney was wrapped around him comfortingly from behind, like he really was, but the part he’d had to awaken from, the part he was having trouble shaking, was that he’d had someone curled against his chest, too, someone very small, someone with soft fuzzy dark hair, someone who’d smelled like laundry and sunshine and outdoors and little kid. 

Someone probably right around four or five years old.

“Whoa, hey,” Ronon said, catching up to him, “don’t stop short like that, you’ll pass out.” 

John nodded mutely and kept moving as well as he could, knees rubbery with overexertion. 

“You’ve really got a wild hair this morning,” Ronon said. “Someone spike your coffee?”

John shook his head and kept moving. 

 

 

 

John knew he should’ve caught on to the pattern but he fell for it every time, believed it was real every time. It was worse than the Replicators because it wasn’t just convincing, it was exactly what he wanted. It was the most gratifying form of wish-fulfillment, and it was worst because it wasn’t obvious, it wasn’t something he’d ever really admitted to himself that he wanted. But Jesus, he did. Oh God. He kept dreaming— and they _were_ dreams, absolutely— that he was sleeping with Rodney, having sex with Rodney, lying next to Rodney, snuggling with Rodney, and they were just enough like reality that he never caught on, but Rodney kept calling him John and kept saying sweet things, saying he loved him, shit like that. And every single fucking time, John reacted like it was real, like he believed it, and said all kinds of mushy shit back, the kinds of things he hadn’t ever even let himself think. 

Because when he woke up it always took him way too long to remember that he’d been dreaming. And sometimes he’d forget, and it wouldn’t be until Rodney called him Sheppard again that he’d remember, that wasn’t them, they didn’t do that, it hadn’t been real. 

He knew it was the machine thing. He hadn’t had any nightmares since he’d gotten the thing. He had these dreams instead. It wasn’t like they were all sex dreams; a lot of times, they were just snuggling. 

And probably the worst part was that once in a while, the kid showed up too, crawling into bed with him and calling him Daddy and curling up in his arms because he was too scared of the dark to sleep on his own. And John’s tongue would answer, without him thinking about it, and would call the kid “Joey”, and say easy things to him like this happened all the time. 

John knew he should give the machine back to Rodney, should tell him what it was doing to him. But the thing was, he couldn’t bear to. It only hurt him to have to remember that those things weren’t real, but during the times he could forget, it felt so good. And it felt so normal, and so right. The sex with Rodney was almost exactly like the sex they really had, the snuggling was almost exactly like the way they really slept when he stayed in Rodney’s bed, even some of the things they said to each other were the same. Except Rodney called him John and fairly frequently professed to love him. And in those dreams, John’s tongue was looser, and answered him back the same way, as easy and natural as if he could say those things every day. 

It hurt, quite badly, every time he thought of it and remembered that those things weren’t real. But he couldn’t stop. He couldn’t make himself take the damn machine out of the little pocket he’d stitched for it in his pillowcase. Couldn’t even make himself not bring the thing along on the nights he let himself sleep in Rodney’s bed. And there were too many of those. He couldn’t stay away. He broke his own rule and started turning up at Rodney’s door in the late evenings, trying and failing to look nonchalant, with the little machine in his pocket. 

And every time, he would try to pay attention, try to notice when reality left off and the dream started. It was almost as though if he could catch himself, he could control it, or something. But he never could, he could never pick up on it until he woke up. 

It wasn’t sustainable, of course. John knew he had to cut it out. But for every time he woke up, remembered, and angrily chucked the machine into the bedside drawer, there always came a time later, usually that night, when the yearning got so bad he pulled it right back out of the drawer and put it in the pocket under his pillow or, worse, took it with him as he went and scratched on Rodney’s door. 

Until the night Rodney answered the door looking a little flustered, still fully clothed and with his radio in his ear, and said “Oh um, uh, hey Sheppard, I, um,” and John looked past him and noticed that Katie Brown was sitting at his desk, looking polite, hands in her lap. 

John blinked, breath slowing for a very drawn-out instant. Then he recovered, smiled at Rodney, put his hand into his pocket and pulled out the little machine. “I just came to give you this,” he said. “It’s, it’s sort of not working.” He pressed the machine into Rodney’s hand and turned to walk away. 

“Wait,” Rodney said, “wait, what’s it doing?”

“Givin’ me weird dreams,” John said, not turning back. “I think I’d sort of rather have the nightmares. At least I know where I stand with those.”

“Wait,” Rodney said again, but he walked away and didn’t look back. 

 

 

 

 

“I fucked up,” Rodney said, flopping down dramatically on the couch. 

“What did you fuck up?” Carson asked resignedly. 

“I fucked up,” Rodney said again. 

“Yes,” Carson said, “you told me that. But what?”

“I fucked things up with Sheppard,” Rodney said. 

“Ach,” Carson said, “that man is so god-damned delicate. He expects you to be a mind-reader, Rodney, I’ve told you before, he’s asking unreasonable things of you.”

“No,” Rodney said, “I can see his point on this one.”

“What, did you look at him twice at breakfast?” Carson asked. “Or perhaps stand too close, or worse— too far away— in a mission debriefing? Or did you initiate conversation on a day where the moon rose later than 1800 hours, or fail to initiate conversation on a day when it rose earlier than 1800?”

“No,” Rodney said, annoyed. Okay, maybe he’d been complaining about Sheppard a lot. 

“You know I love the colonel dearly, Rodney,” Carson said, “and I do think he cares about you a great deal, but he’s forever fencing you in with these arbitrary and arcane rules. You really ought to have some say in the relationship, shouldn’t you? It’s meant to be a two-way sort of street, is it not?”

“He came by my quarters like he’s been doing lately,” Rodney said, giving up and just going ahead with his story.

“Wait,” Carson interrupted, “wait, wait, _he_ came to _you_ instead of demanding you read his mind and approach _him_ at the right time?”

“Shut up,” Rodney said, sitting up on his elbows in exasperation.

“I’m just saying, Rodney,” Carson said. “I think he treats you appallingly.”

“You’re not helping,” Rodney said crossly. 

“No,” Carson said sweetly, “no, I’m not. Do go on.”

Rodney lay back down. “He came by and I’d lost track of the time and Katie Brown was in my room.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Carson said, sounding a bit startled. 

“Well,” Rodney said. “Not for— she’d come to me with a question, a concern really, about a conflict in her department, and while I’m hardly an HR type, it is my science department and thus sort of my concern, so we were discussing possible solutions to it.”

“Oh.” Carson sounded almost disappointed. 

“Well, but that’s the thing,” Rodney said, “it wasn’t anything non-work-related! She just came by after hours so nobody would see her talk to me. It’s a politically sensitive thing, she doesn’t want anyone to know she came to me with the concern, she could be shunned as a whistleblower.”

“And you’re sure that’s really why she came by,” Carson said. “Not perhaps any other reason.”

“She was the spokesperson for a concerned small group,” Rodney said. “I, what are you saying?” He sat up to look at Carson, blank with confusion.

“I’m saying she might have volunteered to be the spokesperson for more reasons than just simple concern at departmental politics,” Carson said. Rodney stared at him. “I’m saying that I can see why Sheppard perhaps took it the way I’m assuming he did. For once the man isn’t being oversensitive.”

“But I don’t,” Rodney said, at a loss for words, “I didn’t, Carson! That wasn’t it at all!”

“I’m sorry,” Carson said, “I keep interrupting you. So what happened, exactly?”

“Well,” Rodney said, not really mollified, “I opened the door and Sheppard was standing there, and he looked past me and saw Katie, and just smooth as anything he put his hand in his pocket and took out the nightmare-fixing machine I gave him, handed it to me, and said it didn’t work right, and left, just like that.”

“When are you going to give me a copy of that to look at?” Carson asked. “I’ve been wanting to see that thing and you’ve never given me one.”

“Here,” Rodney said glumly, and handed Sheppard’s to him. “I mean, don’t use it to sleep with, unless you’re sure you can get it to reset for you, because otherwise it’s going to try to correct your brain patterns to Sheppard’s, and you’ll get his sex dreams or whatever the thing’s been doing to him. He said it was giving him weird dreams but he didn’t elaborate and I can’t get him to talk to me about anything not directly work-related.”

Carson was turning the device over in his fingers. “I don’t want Colonel Sheppard’s weird sex dreams, that’s for sure,” he said. He glanced up at Rodney. “No offense, but especially not if you’re in them.”

“Ha ha,” Rodney said. 

“I’m serious,” Carson said. 

“But what do I do?” Rodney asked. “He was so— I hesitate to say happy, but he seemed to really like that I’d made him that thing, and he used it all the time, I know he did, so him giving it back to me can’t really be about it not working, can it?”

Carson regarded him sympathetically. “Aye, lad,” he said, “you’re probably right.”

“So what do I do?” Rodney asked, despairing. 

“I’m afraid there’s no substitute for talking to him,” Carson said. “If that’s what you want. Otherwise, I’m really thinking you ought to see about that Katie Brown, she didn’t volunteer to turn up at your quarters late in the evening solely out of a selfless desire to help her colleagues.”

“I’m not going to just give up on Sheppard because he annoys you,” Rodney said grouchily.

“He doesn’t annoy me,” Carson said. “ _You_ do, every other day when he dumps you again for some perceived failure to read his mind.”

“He doesn’t do that,” Rodney blustered. 

“Oh, no,” Carson said, “of course not. It’s more like every other week.”

“That’s not fair at all,” Rodney said. “God, I don’t even know why I come to you with these things.”

“I don’t know either,” Carson said. “We’ve a perfectly good shrink, and I’m not it.”

 

 

 

It took Rodney a couple of days to work out that Carson was sort of right. Not about Sheppard, of course— Carson just didn’t understand Sheppard at all, and Rodney put it down to jealousy that Sheppard had supplanted him as the best expression of the ATA gene, especially when it turned out Carson couldn’t make head nor tail of the nightmare-prevention machine. 

But Carson was right about Katie Brown. She kept kind of putting herself into his day, being where she knew he’d be. It could have been coincidence, it was so nonchalant, but Rodney was a little better at pattern recognition than that. The other possibility was that she was just anxious about the dispute she’d brought over Grolevich hogging lab time, but that resolved itself rather neatly without Rodney having to do anything more than flip out on him theatrically one time when he discovered him occupying the lab during a time clearly scheduled to someone else (well, Katie, as it happened, and if that seemed to start rumors about him and Katie, well, he wasn’t really sure what that meant). 

It was around that time that Sheppard and Rodney’s game got busted, when they found out that it wasn’t a simulation at all but was jerking those poor people’s actual lives around. So there went the primary activity the two of them did together that wasn’t work-related. When it turned out that Sheppard was secretly really good at chess, Rodney made a really earnest play at dragging him back to his quarters for some long-missed ravishing (because holy shit he’d never been _turned on_ by _losing at chess_ before), but Sheppard seemed determined to misinterpret his clumsy advances and stopped speaking to him entirely for about a week and a half except at meetings. 

Elizabeth might have seen through Rodney’s attempts to schedule more meetings, because she showed up to the third one, dragged Rodney back to her office, threw him in it, and shut the door behind him, walking purposefully away. Sheppard was sitting on the edge of her desk, looking rather startled. Rodney tripped over the chair and Sheppard caught him gracefully. 

“Whoa there,” Sheppard said. 

“You weren’t going to come to my meeting?” Rodney demanded peevishly, letting Sheppard set him back onto his feet, a little guiltily pleased at the excuse to put his hands on Sheppard’s chest. He was wearing Rodney’s favorite of his fifteen near-identical black shirts— this one was sort of old and had shrunk a little in the wash, so it showed a tiny peek of white along each bicep where it was shorter than his tan line, and a little strip of belly if Sheppard moved wrong. 

“I showed up,” Sheppard said. “Five minutes early. Elizabeth stormed in, said _this is ridiculous_ , grabbed me by the arm and dragged me up here.” 

“That’s what she just did to me,” Rodney said, bewildered, rubbing his arm where she’d been gripping it. 

“Ah,” Sheppard said, smiling tightly as if that meant something to him. He went over to the door.

“Wait,” Rodney said. “Sheppard.”

“We’re cool,” Sheppard said impatiently. “It’s fine. Jeez. Stop calling meetings.”

Rodney stared at him miserably. “You never told me what was wrong with the nightmare machine thingy,” he said, feeling unaccountably forlorn and knowing helplessly that he was wearing it on his face.

Sheppard was as inscrutable as he usually was. “Yes I did,” he said. “It gave me weird dreams. It was kinda driving me nuts.”

“Were they worse than the nightmares?” Rodney asked anxiously. “That’s the opposite of what I was trying to do. I really am serious, I was trying to _help_ you.”

“I know,” Sheppard said, expression softening a little. “Rodney. I know. It’s okay. No, they weren’t worse than the nightmares.” He still hadn’t gone through the door, though, and that was progress. 

“Then what were they?” Rodney asked. “What was so bad about them? I’m really trying to— Carson can’t make any sense out of that thing, and I really think it’ll be useful if I can come up with a way for non-gene carriers to use it, but I need to know what it did wrong.”

Sheppard sighed. “I, I think I was dreaming about one of the alternate universes I saw,” he said. “And it, I know that doesn’t make sense, but it was— I couldn’t tell, while it was happening, that I was dreaming, and I kept thinking it was real, and then I’d be so confused when I woke up.” 

Rodney stared at him. “That’s impossible,” he said. 

Sheppard looked away. “I know,” he said. “It must be— but I didn’t— I don’t know why I dreamed about those things.”

“Well,” Rodney said, puzzled, “how do you know that’s what it was?”

“Things were different,” Sheppard said. “I was me, and you were you, but you didn’t act the same, and J— the kid was there, sometimes. That’s how I know, the kid.”

“Oh,” Rodney said. 

“And then I’d wake up and he was gone and it always took me a minute to remember that he’s gone because he never existed,” Sheppard said. 

“Oh,” Rodney said. “I guess that’d… kinda do a number on you, huh?”

Sheppard didn’t answer for a moment, standing with his hands on his hips and looking at the door. “Yeah,” he said quietly after a pause, “and if it’s not that I’m seeing an alternate universe, then I’m…” He trailed off, shook his head. “Then I’m even more fucked-up than I thought.” 

Rodney made a face, and after a moment Sheppard glanced over and saw it, and laughed softly, looking away again. “Did it help overall?” Rodney asked. “By suppressing nightmares for a while, at least, did it give you some measure of relief from them?”

“They hadn’t been so bad lately,” Sheppard said, almost apologetically. “I— I hadn’t had many since we came back. It kind of comes and goes, as a, as a thing. You’ve seen me at my worst, mostly. Usually it’s maybe once a week, maybe less, so not having any for a couple weeks is notable but not extreme.”

“Have you had any since you gave the machine back?” Rodney asked. 

Sheppard’s eyes darted sideways and he chewed his lips for a second. “One?” he offered, looking up. “But it wasn’t— it wasn’t the usual suspects.”

“Do you usually dream about the same thing?” Rodney asked. 

Sheppard made a face, scrunching his nose and stretching his pressed-together lips across his face. “Mostly,” he admitted. “And the one this week was different.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Rodney considered that a moment. “The issue is that I’m patently unqualified to evaluate any of the psychological ramifications of the things I’m doing here,” he said. 

“Which is why I’ve been talking it over with Heightmeyer this whole time,” Sheppard said, but that smirk was his amused one, not his contemptuous one. “Trust me, she and Beckett have plenty of meaningful data to work with here.”

“Oh,” Rodney said. 

“She’s been working on a report for you,” Sheppard said. “I don’t think she’s done. Beckett gave her the machine when it turned out he couldn’t really get it to do much, and I’ve been manipulating it for her.”

“Oh,” Rodney said. 

“Don’t worry,” Sheppard said, giving Rodney his curviest smile, “you’ll still get credit in the paper.”

Rodney, knowing what Sheppard was after, treated him to a nicely wound-up rant on how it was his idea and he should get the credit and his Nobel and so on and so forth, and they walked together out of Elizabeth’s office, Sheppard smiling in a manner that looked exasperated but, Rodney noted with satisfaction, had a great deal of fondness in it. And maybe they were okay now. He hoped. 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I've adhered exceptionally well to canon by out of nowhere being like "oh yeah Beckett was Rodney's best friend and they hung out all the time" when it's narratively convenient and sort of after the fact. :)  
> To be fair, I did headcanon these kinds of conversations earlier, but I never wrote them because I was too busy with smut and angst.


End file.
